Codeblocks is essentially notepad with a gui for mingw compiler options. It cant be compared with visual studio in terms of development, refactoring, and debugging tools.

> notepad with a gui for mingw compiler options

That was a bit harsh. It definitely isn't VS, but there is code navigation, auto completion, debugging etc.

Their features page states otherwise: http://www.codeblocks.org/features -- Multiple compilers (Mingw, MSVC, Borland, and more).. Build in debugger, plugin support, etc. I haven't used it, so i'm just assuming their website is accurate

Having used it, I know the debugger works. I didn't get into the more complicated stuff much.

Does codeblocks have advanced code manipulation tools, i.e. refactoring support (in the presence of complex templated code)? It's an extremely complex problem for C++, and JetBrains seem to have the right brains to solve it.

Doesn't look like it - AppCode definitely looks way better, I was just curious that there may be others in this arena already.

eclipse is the best c ide out there at the moment for non-ms platforms.

intellij idea used to have a third-party c/c++ plugin, which was ok, but it stopped being maintained a while back. this was frustrating because otherwise you can develop in intellij in most popular languages. so c/c++ support had been a strange omission for some time - see this support issue, for example - http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-86304

(i haven't seen anything saying that this will be an intellij idea plugin - but afaik that's how all their other products work).

Netbeans is also quite good, given that it is the official IDE for Solaris development.

What I miss in Netbeans is an integrated static analyzer like Eclipse's CDT (Codan).